Functional Linguistics: The Prague School

The Prague school practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, for linguist working in the America tradition, a grammar is a set of elements of various kinds of Bloomfield’s framework, rules; Prague linguistics, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look at motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

They were describing the structure of language , they used the notions  “phone” and “morpheme”, they tried to beyond the description to explanation ,saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.

Trubetzkoy developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: the private opposition, gradual opposition, equipollent opposition.  Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition. The obvious function, that of keeping different words of longer sequences apart, he called the distinctive function.

Trubetzkoy

   

The functions of the speech Trubetzkoy followed his Viennese philosopher colleague Karl –Bühler, who distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function and the conative function.

The view of the sound-change is somewhat odds with Saussure’s approach to linguistics; Saussure remember, contrasted synchronic linguistics, as the study of  a system in which the various elements derive their values from their mutual relationships, with historical linguistics as the description of a sequence of isolated, unsystematic events.

The Prague School argues for system in diachronic too, and indeed it claims that linguistic change is determined by, as well as determining synchronic  etat de langue.

Martinet set out his theories of diachronic phonology most fully is significantly entitled  Economie des Changements Phonetiques. The therapeuctic view sound-change is indeed reminiscent of the economist doctrine of the invisible hand, accordin to which the various countervailing forces in an economy tend (in the absence of governamental interference).

Jakobson´s intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of the Prague School as a whole, he was written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature.

Articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters.

The Descriptivists emphasized that languages differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous.

The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appear in a book which Jakobson published and he makes the point that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

The phonological universals he discusses are determined by “deep” psychological principles rather than by relatively uninteresting facts about oral anatomy or the like, Jakobson devotes considerable space to discussion of synaesthetic effects: that is, cases where perceptions in one sensory mode.

One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative systems, registers or styles where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

Saussure stressed the social nature of language, and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because, for the speaker the history of his language does not exist, a point that is undeniable








MORE INFORMATION HERE http://www.ling.fju.edu.tw/phono/prague.htm